Today I #GoSilent for a man named Tom. I don't know his last name, rank, or very much else. He died in Vietnam. His story has always haunted me. The short version is this:
When my father went to Notre Dame, he, like all nerds in the '60s, thought he wanted to be an engineer. /1
When my father went to Notre Dame, he, like all nerds in the '60s, thought he wanted to be an engineer. /1
key flaw with this plan is my father is a genius, but a complete math moron. So the college of engineering was like abject torment for him.
He made fast friends with Tom, who had mistakenly enrolled in the college of engineering instead of the college of English (ENG error) /2
He made fast friends with Tom, who had mistakenly enrolled in the college of engineering instead of the college of English (ENG error) /2
So there they were, freshman year, failing math together, and knowing if they failed they got kicked out of school and sent to Vietnam. They also couldn't transfer out of the engineering program unless they had a marginally passing average. /3
It came down to the last test and they both needed like a 275 on the test to be able to transfer. My dad got a 276; Tom got a 274. Tom flunked out of school, was drafted to Vietnam, sent to the front lines b/c of his engineering experience, and died his second week in-country. /4
Meanwhile, my dad transferred out, went on to be the first person in his family to graduate from college, and law school, and he got to meet my mom and have two pain in the ass kids that he devoted his life to making tough, interesting people who never let anyone off the hook. /5
Dads don't talk about these things. But he was visiting DC one summer, and I saw him touching a name on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial. He walked away before I got there, so I didn't see the name. But later, after he was silent for a long time, he told me about Tom. /6
One point on a math test was the difference between being a name on a wall, and, as Dad saw it, a pretty damn lucky guy who'd had an OK life, & read a lot of Shakespeare & Hemingway & memorized the baseball encyclopedia in between -- who was there visiting a long-dead friend /7
So I #GoSilent for Tom, because what haunts us, in every generation, is the names we don't know, and the stories no one tells, because they die too young, in service to their nation, and there are simply too many, it seems, for them all to be memorialized as they deserve. /8
Tom is one of the things that made me want to be a storyteller. Because we lose too much, and forget too much, about the sacrifices that bought what we have and made us what we are. RIP Tom. Thanks for looking out for my dad for awhile. /9
